Place mouse over image continent. 2.1 (2012): 36–39. From an ethical and political perspective, people and property can hardly be separated. Indeed, the modern political subject – that is, the individual, the person, the self, the autonomous actor, the rational self-interest maximizer, etc. – has taken shape in and through the elaboration, institutionalization, and enactment of that which rightfully belongs to it. This thread can be traced back perhaps most directly to Locke’s notion that the origin of the political state (...) occurs when people rise above the state of nature by ceding the power to prosecute offenses. The rule of law begins then with a defense of the right to property. People become subjects by adhering to the social contract, which they do by deferring the defense of their own property to the state. In this light, the response of the United States federal government to the financial crisis of 2008 appears to many as a breach of the social contract. The chant “banks got bailed out, we got sold out” states the claim plainly. Why exactly did some subjects (e.g., the banks) have their property defended by the state (i.e., through the variety of programs including TARP, the discount window at the US Federal Reserve, etc.), when other subjects (e.g., homeowners) found themselves without protection of their property rights, forced to default on mortgage debts and face dispossession? Even if the rhetoric about “too big to fail” can be believed, and the collapse of the financial system would lead to negative consequences for people who had little or no connection to the activities that brought it about, such consequences need not call into question the notion that everyone stands equally before the law. To occupy, then, appears as a form of civil disobedience, an intentional, retaliatory breach of the social contract by those who feel that they have lost the support of the state to which they ceded their power as sovereign agents. The visible and the invisible The violation of property rights of people who have recognition, protection and power under the law destabilizes their very status as citizens and tests the limit of democracy. Does the financial system force the dematerialized victimization of individuals? Do people become numbers, or worse still, percentages of unemployed, tranches of defaulted mortgages and foreclosures? Are they perhaps instead disenfranchised prospectively from the privileged position occupied by virtual entities and actors such as those involved in the derivatives markets, always already exiled back into the physical, visible realm? The line of conflict appears to be drawn between invisibility/absence/deferral and visibility/presence/realization. The demonstrators occupy an excess property of those subjects, namely, the banks and financial elite, who did receive recognition and protection under the law. By domesticating this excess property, rendering its invisibility visible within the political economy, the protesters raise a new form of threat to the hegemonic order. To occupy, then, involves a rejection of the order under which the “99%” have been subjected to erasure. The occupation seeks creatively to establish a new means of communication and law for its subjects. In the face of an existing power structure that is increasingly disenfranchising the majority of people while consolidating nodes of power and influence, the “occupation”, or the work of the Occupy movement, involves seizing a space that refuses the rules of the existing, allegedly corrupt sovereign state. This refusal of governance extends even to include a steadfast refusal to articulate a strategy, to formulate a list of demands, to converse with the sovereign power on the grounds of its own conventions, to put forth a leader, to resolve the ambiguity of the movement into a discreet identity, face, or voice. Do these tactics provide a resolution to the problem that was its genesis? Not in such a direct and easily resolved manner, but it remains difficult to imagine a direct and simple resolution to the problematic of the breach of the social contract. The ambiguity of the situation has generated significant interest within the broader populace, though many people sympathetic to the cause appear to be frustrated because the movement has not simply put forward a short list of concrete demands, or even a set of leaders and spokespeople, much less a resolution. And yet, this lack of coherence appears as a resolution of a problem generic to protest movements in the past, where individual leaders can be removed or discredited, and lists of demands can be co-opted by others holding more political power. Meanwhile, the ambiguity has compelled imitations on a global scale, with the Occupy Wall Street participants consciously taking actions that can be replicated by anyone anywhere without significant cost. These actions have taken place not in a peripheral location such as a parking lot in New Jersey, but instead close to the centers of power and governance, adjacent to Wall Street, close to the White House, on college campuses, etc. This spontaneous archipelago of protests becomes an irritant, a negation of the accepted order of protests, but when the protesters themselves move outside of their encampments, they are escorted by the police, constantly monitored and maintained so that a permanent state of paranoid persecution takes hold. To occupy, occupying, occupation – these actions involve a variable degree of danger – are you willing to step into a different space, where the rule of law is unclear and evolving? Are you presenting yourself as a representative of the majority, the 99%? Who has a sense of belonging to the 99%? This previously invisible population becomes a focal point of political power, garners increasing public support, infects the public dialogue. The government recognizes this population by forcing it from the occupied space, removing the element of possession of property. It is at this point of conflict, in the struggle to hold the physical property, where the greatest friction and violence occurs. Scaling the rule of law While occupied, the property calls for a redress of grievances, a restoration of the rule of law. The Occupy movement does not select and put forward individuals or leaders, it puts forward places – the occupied property represents the point of conflict, not the individual. And it is this very property that the government then tries to reclaim. The movement remains faceless, anonymous, uncounted, or rather counted only as a mass, the self-labeled mass of 99%. These spaces are like refugee camps or favelas, but constructed to unite the political life and private life of the protesters. This objective is presented as a tactical necessity, as all other means of protest and communication have failed, leaving only the option of seizing, holding, occupying a property. But to what end, exactly? Can anyone deliberately return to the prior social contract, embrace, affirm, and govern in strict accordance with the earlier relationship to property, following the logic of Locke’s arguments? In this respect, the contemporary crisis indicates a new, transitional phase in the way that property operates, or rather, in the balance between real and virtual value. The roots of the crisis lay in the massive overvaluation of property caused by lax lending practices, as more people were encouraged to borrow more money, which drove up the prices of property. At the same time, these individual properties, these mortgages for homes actual families lived in and worked to support, were bundled into securities that could be bought, sold, and speculated on. The reduction of a physical house or piece of real estate to an almost incalculably small element in an investment vehicle appears as a scaling of the hedge that radically diminishes the value of any individually owned property. Moreover, a number of recently-innovated financial products allow investors to hedge in new ways, to deliberately spread risk around a portfolio in hopes of bringing returns even when the individual mortgage defaults. At the level of the ‘free’ market, these virtual negative valuations are designed to balance the physical positive valuation, though many of the biggest lenders are now being investigated for controlling both sides of this valuation, the positive and the negative, to facilitate both the creation and failure of the investments and to profit from both. The ability to benefit from both the negative and positive value of an investment is a result of a technologically enabled capacity to operate within a complex field. These layered and scaled investment vehicles and the simultaneous negation of their value together represent a commingling of the virtual and physical existence that is both complex and multiple. The valuation of a virtual property has tremendous power to change the valuation of the physical - either injecting it with or depriving it of funds, pumping in or draining life and energy. This situation has roots of its own – the notion of property advanced e.g., throughout the enclosure movement in Britain was, from the outset, an imposition of virtuality (i.e., the concept of law, the institutions associated with ownership, etc.) on the physical reality of land. 1 The difference today is that technological trading platforms combined with innovations within the financial services industry have enabled the reduction of each individual property receiving or losing value in scale to an almost atomic level. In turn, the number of properties held simultaneously and valued as a massive, multiple wholes – i.e., the derivatives market in mortgage-backed securities – is a new phenomenon made possible through the application of similar technologies and institutional structures. And those actors who can trade in these layers of complexity can then profit from the new phase of disassociation of the virtual and the physical – unconcerned with and operating at such a virtual distance from the individual residing physically on a particular piece of real estate that they no longer feel the tug of the physical tying them back to the physical, operating literally as in a video game, in a virtually distanced world. What can or should be done about this situation? Answers lie outside the scope of this current essay, but merit consideration in the near future… NOTE 1) Hernando de Soto has emphasized this dimension by empirically demonstrating its non-existence in many countries in The Mystery of Capital. (shrink)

Research suggests that attitudes guide individuals’ thinking and actions. In this study, we explore the monetary intelligence construct and investigate the relationships between a formative model of money attitudes involving affective, behavioral, and cognitive components and several sets of outcome variables—unethical intentions, intrinsic and extrinsic job satisfaction, and coping strategies. Based on 515 managers in the Republic of Macedonia, we test our model for the whole sample and also cross sector and gender. Managers’ negative stewardship behavior and positive cognitive (...) meaning of money define MI which, in turn, is related to unethical intentions. Positive cognition in the public sector and poor stewardship behavior in the private sector contribute to unethical intentions, respectively. Good stewards have higher intrinsic and lower extrinsic job satisfaction, those in the private sector, in particular. Affective motive and stewardship behavior are related to their stronger “approach” coping strategies and weaker “avoidance” coping strategies. Affective motive and stewardship behavior contribute to coping responses for managers in the public and private sectors, respectively. Further, the relationship between stewardship behavior and coping mechanisms exists for females, but not for males. We demonstrate that MI, a type of social intelligence, allows individuals to monitor their own emotions, behaviors, and cognitions and guides their thinking and actions. (shrink)

In recent years, the fight against money laundering has emerged as a key issue of financial regulation. The Wolfsberg Group is an important multistakeholder agreement establishing corporate responsibility principles against money laundering in a domain where international coordination remains otherwise difficult. The fact that 10 out of the 25 top private banking institutions joined this initiative opens up an interesting puzzle concerning the conditions for the participation of key industry players in the Wolfsberg Group. The article presents a (...) fuzzy-set analysis of seven hypotheses based on firm-level organizational factors, the macro-institutional context, and the regulatory framework. Results from the analysis of these 25 financial institutions show that public ownership of the bank and the existence of a code of conduct are necessary conditions for participation in the Wolfsberg Group, whereas factors related to the type of financial institution, combined with the existence of a black list, are sufficient for explaining participation. (shrink)

The present debate on constitutional rights aims to protect the individual against the intrusive power of the state. Analysing the precarious relationship between art and money, the authors argue that constitutional rights need to be extended into the regimes of private governance. This requires four fundamental changes. (1) Constitutional rights can no longer be limited to the protection of individual actors. Instead, they need to be extended to guarantees of freedom of discourses. (2) The new experience of the twentieth (...) century is that totalizing tendencies have their origin not only in politics, but also in other fields of action, especially in technology, science, and the economy. Thus, a discursive concept of constitutional rights should be directed against any social system with totalizing tendencies. (3) Instead of concentrating on centres of economic and social power, constitutional rights in the private sphere should focus on the specific communicative medium of the expansionist social system involved. (4) This excludes the direct analogy of a ‘right’ as a quasispatial exclusion zone. More significant guarantees of discursive autonomy could be found in a ‘proceduralization’ of constitutional rights. (shrink)

The article considers Gertrude Stein’s reflections about the increasing abstraction of economics in response to the Great Depression and Roosevelt’s New Deal in a number of explicitly political pieces from the mid-1930s, including “A Political Series”, and her five brief newspaper commentaries on “money”: ”Money”, “More About Money”, “Still More About Money”, “All About Money”, and “My Last About Money”. The article then relates them to Walter Benjamin’s and Giorgio Agamben’s ideas about the religious (...) implications of the money system that resonate with Stein’s salute to the “believer in money” as security against contemporary authoritarian tendencies. Stein’s opinion pieces argue against taxation, unionism, and public spending, yet also demonstrate the slippery passage between her explicit conservatism, her economic liberalism and her still present radicalism and critique of patriarchal authority as they recycle crucial elements from contemporaneous works such The Geographical History of America and Everybody’s Autobiography. (shrink)

Theories of justice rely on a variety of criteria to determine what social arrangements should be considered just. For most theories, the distribution of financial resources matters. However, they take the existence of money as a given and tend to ignore the way in which the creation of money impacts distributive justice. Those with access to collateral are favoured in the creation of credit or debt, which represents the main form of money today. Appealing to the idea (...) that access to credit confers freedom, and that inequalities in this freedom are morally arbitrary, this article shows how the advantage to those with collateral plays out in different ways in today’s economy. The article identifies several forms of bias inherent in money creation, and its subsequent destruction: loans from commercial banks to individuals and corporations, interbank lending, lending from central banks to commercial banks, and selective bail-outs by central banks. These are not mere inequalities: they are unjust since alternative designs of the financial architecture exist that would significantly reduce them. The paper focuses on one possible reform with the potential to address several of the types of bias identified, namely the separation of money creation from private bank credit. (shrink)

Taking the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume as its subject, this book breaks new ground in focusing its lens on a little-studied aspect of Hume's thinking: his understanding of money. George Caffentzis makes both an intervention in the field of monetary philosophy and into Marxian conceptions of the relation between philosophy and capitalist development. He vividly charts the ways in which Hume's philosophy directly informed the project of 'civilizing' the people of the Scottish Highlands and pacifying the English proletariat (...) in response to the revolts of both groups at the heart of the empire. Built on careful historical and philosophical detective work, Civilizing Money offers a stimulating and radical political reading of the ways in which Hume's fundamental philosophical claims performed concrete political functions. (shrink)

The cases of corruption reported by the media tend almost always to involve a private party (a citizen or a corporation) that pays, or promises to pay, money to a public party (a politician or a public official, for example) in order to obtain an advantage or avoid a disadvantage. Because of the harm it does to economic efficiency and growth, and because of its social, political and ethical consequences, private-to-public corruption has been widely studied. Private-to-private corruption, by contrast, (...) has been relatively neglected and only recently has started to receive the attention it deserves. The purpose of this paper is to offer some thoughts on the nature and importance of private-to-private corruption; the legal treatment it receives in some of the world''s leading countries; and the measures that companies can take to combat it, with special consideration of its ethical aspects. (shrink)

continent. 1.1 (2011): 22-25. The Author gratefully acknowledges the financial support of CAPES (Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento do Ensino Superior), Brazil. From the multifarious subdivisions of semiotics, be they naturalistic or culturalistic, the realm of semiotics of value is a ?eld that is getting more and more attention these days. Our entire political and economic systems are based upon structures of symbolic representation that many times seem not only to embody monetary value but also to determine it. The connection between monetary (...) and linguistic exchanges is self-evident: the former requires the latter and develops in direct relation to it. Creative experimentation and design of digital systems of value exchange are blossoming on the web. Dr. Gilson Schwartz, an economist turned media theorist and professor at the University of São Paulo, adopted the concept of Iconomics, originally created by Michael Kaplan, an author concerned with the linguistics of economic value. Empowering local communities and unlocking new levels of value creation and representation via digital technologies are the main goals of Dr. Schwartz’s projects, aiming at the re-designing of our relationship to the economic value of imagination and the social control of property. Schwartz is Assistant Professor at the School of Communication and Arts of the University of São Paulo, a former Chief Economist at BankBoston, Brazil and Advisor to the President of the National Social and Economic Development Bank (BNDES). FURTHER READING: Kaplan, Michael. “Iconomics: The Rhetoric of Speculation.” Public Culture . 15.3 (2003): 477-493. Renata Lemos-Morais: You have recently produced and directed a short documentary about Creative Currencies in Latin America. Could you tell us a bit about its process and its findings? Gilson Schwartz: The “Creative Currencies” project is a work-in-progress platform which unfolds as an action research agenda connected both to the production of audiovisual content and the development of social currency software. The initiative dates back to 2003 when I led an experimental project supported by the Presidency of Brazil. At that time, we issued paper currency in a small, touristic village in the Northeast Region which stimulated local cultural projects. But it was only in 2009 that the Central Bank of Brazil acknowledged “social currencies” as a legitimate economic agenda, calling for more debate at the I Financial Inclusion Forum. This year, the monetary authorities organized a second forum that also opened the room to discussions on mobile payment systems and new perspectives on poverty alleviation via State subsidies. The Ministry of Culture funded the “Creative Currencies” project in 2009-2010 and our next stage in this discovery process is to be supported by the National Social and Economic Development Bank (BNDES). In short, there is genuine interest among public officials in different areas and public funding for social currencies is on the rise in Brazil. However, after all these years we are still at a very early stage of research and practice. Some of the most successful initiatives (such as Banco Palmas) actually evolved out of local monetary creation to become correspondent banking operations for commercial banks and other financial groups. After eight years of price stability and social inclusion, Brazil stands out as a major opportunity for social experimentation, even the Grameen Bank is now entering the Brazilian market and many NGOs are geared towards different forms of entrepreneurialism in the base of the pyramid, riding solidarity economic models, microfinance and microcredit for local development. It is yet to be seen, however, whether these developments are just one more stage of “bankarization”, that is to say, an extension of regular banking services or actually a new form of social and symbolic self-determination at the local level. So far, the Central Bank of Brazil is open to new forms of credit and local finance as long as they are strictly territorial and very close to barter among the poor. In other words, whether the process of monetary creation could be made to fit an open source paradigm is yet to be seen. Community banking and social currencies might as well end up as just another channel for access to and use of banking services. The “Creative Currencies” project aims at promoting the discussion of more fundamental issues, such as the limits of central banking, the prospects for local financial development and the possibility of creating and managing financial icons as cultural assets. The purpose of this project is to produce short documentaries that will bear testimony to this evolving regulatory framework while inducing more discussion about the fundamental iconomic issues concealed in the process of money and wealth creation. RLM: What new potential is there in applying digital technologies to currency creation? GS: Globalization is a result of the virtualization of money, that is, the overcoming of illusions such as the “gold standard”. Money is an icon created by institutions, not on supposedly natural or material foundations but out of political and financial interests. The “dollar standard” is an outstanding evidence of this phenomenon and Kaplan´s paper, the first to use the expression “iconomics”, insists on the rhetoric and semiotic effects associated to a supposedly scientific model of money creation and management. This is a fundamental change that was perceived and discussed much before the digitalization of the world by unorthodox economists such as John Maynard Keynes since the early 20th century. The digitalization of global financial flows accelerated this immateriality and the creation of the Euro was yet another evidence of the political foundations of currencies. The banking establishment, however, is keen on the idea that scientific formulae hold the key to sound money creation. Keynesianism has been repeatedly associated to “inflationism” while the supposedly sound monetary policies of the Orthodoxy serve well the political and financial interests of a technocratic elite. Corporate media also serve this fictitious depiction of the monetary process despite the cyclical bust of monetary rules and financial regulations. The internet, however, has created numerous opportunities for the disintermediation in industries such as film, music and commodities. There is no reason to doubt that the financial industry can also be transformed by Peer-to-Peer (P2P) infrastructures. Money is media as well. Credit is but confidence. Once people realize that the distributed computing power of networks can also be the platform to weave new monetary and credit operations, there is room for grassroots emancipation out of the established owners of monetary institutions. So far, however, there has been a privatization of monetary management and there is not a clear path or model for the emergent (P2P) property democratization that is inherent to the internet. Digital assets, however, clearly have an inherent potential to escape central control and proprietary regulatory frameworks. RLM: How are social networks transforming the ways in which we exchange value? Do you believe that online influence and reputation might be translated into a new kind of currency? GS: The foundation for social currencies as envisaged by solidarity economics is the territory. Authorities are willing to concede local monetary creation as long as it is restricted to poor neighborhoods, as a proxy to barter. In this relevant but limited context, reputation, personal knowledge and informal ties form the matrix of local or “proximity” finance which are expected to keep credit and leverage to a sustainable level. Anything beyond that should and would lead to an integration of local finance into the established banking system. However, inasmuch as the internet promotes virtual territories and reputation is now subject to all sorts of digital manipulation and stardom becomes an everyday cultural process among teenagers and elders alike, the territorial “foundation” is substituted for more complex patterns of solidarity, cooperation and exchange that reach beyond the physical territory and even the “human.” Digital assets embody knowledge, technology, cultural and educational values that are exchanged at a global scale beyond the control of democratic States (Chinese-like intervention is the exception, not the rule). Hacktivism is unstoppable and so is monetary hacktivism. Especially in the Third World, mobile communications fast became conveyors of money transfers and other appropriation strategies. Banking and telecom sectors already battle for the control of these emerging markets and, as a matter of fact, have so far contributed to the containment of these processes. Governments serve these moguls and have usually adopted a wait-and-see attitude. If open source hardware and grassroots social movements combine to challenge these proprietary battles, then social networks may evolve into new forms of social capital and thus form the ground on which to design and implement social currencies. The global financial crisis, as well as the dollar demise, are an event of such a proportion that social networks may open the path for emancipator subjects to seize the opportunity. RLM: What are some of the social experiments that you think are revolutionizing the way in which value is exchanged? GS: There is a broad evolution of economic systems towards the valuation of intangible assets such as knowledge, reputation and sustainability. There are many examples of local as well as global events that call the traditional systems of exchange into question, from carbon credits to educational bonuses, digital barter frameworks and locally based solidarity and fair trade networks. These emerging examples, no matter how different in nature or scale, represent a challenge to the traditional value creation schemes and theories which are based on use and exchange value, supply and demand. This is not to say that utility and labour or scarcity are to be totally dismissed, but there is now an emerging perception that value is also a function of behavioral codes, symbolic patterns and the energy of institutional frameworks. The plasticity of digital platforms is relevant insofar as intellectual property becomes the central source of value creation. But when you discuss the property rights of public goods such as the environment or basic social rights (of minorities or localities), then a new paradigm seems to emerge. RLM: Are gaming and online storytelling digital practices that might have an impact on the way new currencies are created and developed? GS: “Play money” has been one of the early and most intriguing phenomena associated to the diffusion of virtual worlds. These virtual currencies have also been prone to “boom and bust” dynamics, speculation and pure theft (Second Life scams were common and led to “intervention” by the owners of the game). Storytelling is a major source of value, that is, the value of attention and the markets for audience. There are plenty of private monies created and managed by corporate entertainment groups, telecom operators (via mobile virtual network operators) and marketing frameworks. The casino economy, as already depicted by Keynes and other unorthodox economists, is always storytelling about future states of the world, confidence building and leverage of animal spirits. The novelty of current events is not the fictitious nature of any form of capital, but the potential for digital democratization of controls over the imaginary nature of value creation. But this is just a potential, a possibility, a figment that more often than not is appropriated by centralized and opaque private powers. The game industry is a testbed for new connections between storytelling and money creation. RLM: Monetary value was originally connected to the scarcity of precious metals, such as gold. Our entire monetary system seems therefore to function according to a logic of scarcity. Do you believe it is possible to reverse this logic into a logic of abundance? GS: The gold standard was a fiction itself, the “scarcity” is always produced by institutions that regulate confidence and access to credit. The key issue is not to fabricate abundance, but to question the institutions which produce scarcity out of any standard, gold or whatever. Central banks are at the service of private banks in the creation and management of scarcity. RLM: The promise that nanotechnology holds for our future is one of radical abundance (or so say transhumanists). The possibility of creating any kind of material substance through nanoengineering seems each day more feasible. What would this possibility entail in terms of systems of value exchange? GS: Nanotechnology, environmental concerns and grassroots appropriation of distributed knowledge are the frontiers of a new horizon of energy creation and management. Social groups in charge of managing scarcity for the sake of wealth and power concentration must be held accountable for the destruction of our future. Once this key political conundrum is accounted for, new systems of value exchange and even a non-mercantile society will come into existence. Revolutionary theorists such as Marx envisaged transformation via the extreme clash of contradictions between capital and labour. This approach has never led to a change in the systemic logic of scarcity for the sake of social control. We are once again facing the threshold of large scale societal change, but the outcome of the current crisis should come from our imagination, not from yet another paradox of abundance and scarcity. As long as we remain attached to the materiality of value, the illusion of freedom will but reinforce the massive manipulation of necessity. RLM: What do you think is the role of crowdfunding in this context? GS: Crowdsourcing as well as crowdfunding are examples of the peer to peer opportunities that come along with distributed computer power. However, the power structure behind wealth and scarcity creation may or may not be changed by crowd management. But it should not be taken at face value, so to speak. The stock market of course is an early form of crowdfunding without calling into question the proprietary framework of the companies offering their investment projects to the market. Any market is a form of crowdsourcing, that is to say, of distributed forms of supply and demand matchmaking. The wealth of networks, however, depends on the contractual ecosystem, the institutional framework, the channeling of social imagination, not on the purely quantitative distribution of bids and offers. I see economics as supply, demand and code. Once you have access to the code, once openness becomes part of the game, then there is a chance of crowd behavior becoming collective intelligence and sustainable imagination. RLM: Is the development of digital currencies headed towards a pluralistic ecology in which many micro currency systems co-exist, or is it penetrating the mainstream monetary system? If it is affecting the mainstream financial system, what would be its effect in the long-term? GS: The same issue is at stake both at local and global levels. The global system is, as a matter of fact, an unstable ecosystem of “micro currencies” whereas the dollar has so far exerted an overwhelming influence. Local currencies and private monies coexist with national currencies only to the extent that the Central Bank admits, for instance, that grassroots monetary emissions remain territorial and strictly connected to poverty. However, the question of how new developments in digital technologies and nanotechnologies might alter not only our current monetary systems but also our understanding of value in itself, is still an open question. (shrink)

Using empirical evidence gathered from Chinese listed companies, this article explores the relationship between micro-governance mechanisms and corporate philanthropy from a corporate governance perspective. In China’s emerging market, ultimate controlling shareholders of state-owned enterprises are reluctant to donate their assets or resources to charitable organizations; in private enterprises marked by more deviation in voting and cash flow rights, such donations tend to be more likely. However, the ultimate controllers in PEs refuse to donate assets or resources they control or own, (...) which implies that corporate philanthropy by PEs comes at the cost of others, through assets or resources owned by minority shareholders. Even after devastating natural disasters such as the 2008 Wenchuan Earthquake, the controlling shareholders continue to express reluctance to donate any assets they control. Despite widespread evidence that corporate philanthropy boosts corporate growth and profitability, these ultimate controllers indicate no intention to donate their own money as a means to improve corporate performance. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 62.1 (2001) 59-79 [Access article in PDF] Money and Sovereignty in Early Modern France Jotham Parsons [The mint official] must above all seek integrity in the moneys, on which our features are imprinted and on which the general good depends. For what would be safe if our image were offended, and if that which a subject ought to venerate in his heart (...) were immediately violated by a sacrilegious hand? 1Early modern French commentators on money and monetary policy were fond of quoting this very late antique chancery formula; 2 it even appears in the epigraph to one unpublished commonplace book on the subject from the early seventeenth century. 3 Its popularity was no doubt due partly to the fact that classical literature contained few other theoretical statements on the practicalities of issuing money. 4 It also showed how deeply classical humanism had shaped economic thought, as it had done to all of French political culture. This was apparent as early as 1514 in Guillaume Budé's scholarly classic, De Asse et partibus ejus. 5 By 1600 these influences had ensconced themselves so firmly that economic writers found it nearly impossible to talk about money without a [End Page 59] full panoply of classical erudition. 6 In France the second half of the sixteenth century saw the rise of a specialized, expert, and increasingly systematic tradition of monetary thought. Despite its classical vocabulary, this economic literature was in many ways "modern" in its methods, ambitions, and subject. While developing an account which aspired to a scientific explanation of commercial society and of how government and money interacted, the French commentators came to a partial realization of how radically their own society differed from those which had gone before. In this respect the prevailing climate of thought about money influenced even a writer as non-technical as Michel de Montaigne.Traditionally, scholarly treatment of early modern French economic texts has focused on a relatively small range of issues and authors. One such issue, the origins of the "quantity theory of money" (with Jean Bodin as its hero), is notable for its sterility, since that concept was not and could not have been meaningful to contemporaries. 7 The origin and development of "mercantilism" or, more broadly, of "political economy" in general, has proven a more fruitful subject of inquiry. 8 Undeniably, the changing relationships among governments, merchants, and the economy were a major public issue and, in the seventeenth century, a major site of theoretical reflection on the nature of political power generally. Even so, an excessive concentration on mercantilism is dangerous, for however one defines it, it was not the first, and for a long time not the most significant, economic discourse in France. Rather, from the 1560s well into the seventeenth century, French discussions of economic issues centered on very concrete problems brought about by the government's obligation to issue and maintain a stable currency. 9 While one would search this literature in vain for the specific doctrines of modern economics, I argue that it did represent a real achievement in the early modern understanding of commerce and the state. Though they have not received their due from scholars, the writers who took part in these debates formed a large and influential school with close ties to the actual institutions of government. 10 The French monetary theorists did an enormous amount [End Page 60] to set the stage for the mercantilist era. They developed a detailed notion of monetary economics as a specialized discipline, and above all they placed money and economic policy in the context of a multi-national system of commercial states. In so doing, they sought to comprehend and control not just money but the modern state itself.Early modern money was perched uncomfortably between commodity and fiat. Bewildering varieties of coins circulated, composed of all sorts of alloys. The government assigned a face value for each coin which it authorized to circulate in the abstract accounting unit called the "money of account." 11 This value was almost always greater than... (shrink)

This essay is a literature review journey of ancient Chinese texts, including Confucius' Analects, Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historians of China, Pan Ku's The History of the Former Han Dynasty, and official historical texts of subsequent dynasties. Confucius is not against the accumulation of wealth as long as it is acquired through moral means. Sima Qian, the greatest Chinese historian, appreciates the contribution of successful private enterprises towards the betterment of economy by its efficient usage of resources and (...) his opinion is strikingly similar to modern economic theories such as F. A. Hakey's ideas on free market economy. Their standpoints are, however, rejected by all later official view which emphasizes "All land and resources belong to the King." Starting from Pan Ku' proposal on the classification of social hierarchy, businessmen belong to the bottom stratum of the social ladder. The money-making businessmen of the common people is portrayed as "immoral" or even "illegal," but when the profit goes to the King or when the business is state-owned, it is taken as reasonable and highly acceptable. The Chinese King is the controller of most profitable and important businesses in major industries and mining as well as the distributor of most valuable resources. All official view emphasizes the stability of the state, for then the control of the country can be ensured and the power of the King can be consolidated. (shrink)

Large exchange markets, big money, interest-bearing credit, big landholdings, proletarian masses, imperial expansion and even ‘capital’ or ‘salaried workers’, are not in themselves specific, unique institutional features of Modern Capitalism. This article argues that the features that characterize Modern Capitalism are a massive emergence of ‘free’, monetized wage labour, a self-propelled rush to unbounded world expansion and the progressive conversion of expropriated and privatized land into a monetized commodity, as well as a radically new use of the ancestral social (...) institutions of money and credit as an instrument for financing the production of commodities to obtain a surplus in the form of monetary profit, but also to generate expropriatory social debt relations. This article explains these dynamic historical forces and their importance for political philosophy and for legal and economic history and economics and sheds some light on the relationship between ‘capitalism’ and ‘modernity’. (shrink)

In Study 1, we test a theoretical model involving temptation, monetary intelligence (MI), a mediator, and unethical intentions and investigate the direct and indirect paths simultaneously based on multiple-wave panel data collected in open classrooms from 492 American and 256 Chinese students. For the whole sample, temptation is related to low unethical intentions indirectly. Multi-group analyses reveal that temptation predicts unethical intentions both indirectly and directly for male American students only; but not for female American students. For Chinese students, both (...) paths are non-significant. Love of money contributes significantly to MI for all students. In Study 2, using money as a temptation and giving them opportunities to cheat on a matrix task, most Chinese students (78.4 %) do not cheat in open classrooms; supporting survey and structural equation modeling (SEM) results in Study 1. However, students in private cubicles cheat significantly more (53.4 %) than those in open classrooms (21.6 %). Finally, students’ love of money attitude predicts cheating. Factor rich predicts the cheating amount, whereas factor motivator predicts the cheating percentage. Our results shed new light on the impact of temptation and love of money as dispositional traits, money as a temptation, and environmental context (public vs. private) on unethical intentions and cheating behaviors. (shrink)

Waging war for money has been frowned upon since the Peace of Westphalia and the rise of the modern nation-state. The stigma associated with private warfare translates, in legal terms, into a prohibition on mercenary activity and denying mercenaries the protection afforded to regular combatants . Noting the apparent similarities between mercenaries and private military contractors, some have sought to extend to the latter the restrictive regime applicable to the former. But the resemblance between these two types of actors (...) should not imply that private warfare, in its modern form, is condemnable outright. This Article argues that an inclusive approach to military outsourcing—drawing upon historical, legal and moral perspectives—is necessary to contend with the challenges raised by the growth of the private military industry. I examine the connection between history , morality , and law , to show that private warfare deserves a more nuanced and pragmatic treatment under international law. (shrink)

Imprisonment calls into question the institutionalized violence of the state and its organs. It touches on the very core of the meaning of state sovereignty and concerns one of the most disempowered groups of society: indicted criminals. Therefore, privatization of prisons signals the willingness to apply privatization policies almost with no limitations. Private prisons have become a known phenomenon in many countries. After the debate on this issue seemed to lose its pragmatic value—in contrast to its importance on the theoretical (...) level—privatization of prisons reemerged as an issue of legal debate due to the Israeli Supreme Court decision that declared a law authorizing the establishment of a private prison unconstitutional. The following analysis evaluates this decision using it as a microcosm for studying the role of law in regulating privatization policies. The Article starts by studying the full range of privatization policies, in order to offer an analysis that would be relevant also to other cases along the privatization spectrum. It then challenges the traditional premise of public law that the move to privatization is merely a matter of policy and not of law. More concretely, the Article offers an analysis based upon distinguishing among three distinct spheres of discussion: the boundaries of privatization, the privatization process, and the regulation of privatized actions. This model of analysis is then applied to the case-study of prison privatization as decided by the Israeli Supreme Court. (shrink)

In this study, we developed a model of unethical behavior intentions, collected data from managers of the private (n = 208) and the public (n = 307) sectors in the Republic of Macedonia, and tested our model across these two sectors. Results suggested that for both sectors, unethical behavior intentions were not related to the love of money and corporate ethical values, whereas irritation was negatively related to life satisfaction. Moreover, corporate ethical values were related to life satisfaction for (...) the private sector only, whereas the love of money and unethical behavior intentions were related to irritation for the public sector only. Managers in the private sector had higher corporate ethical values, lower unethical behavior intentions, lower irritation, and higher life satisfaction than those in the public sector. There was no difference in the love of money. There were more bad apples in the public sector (34.85%) than in the private sector (23.56%). The strongest factor of unethical behavior intentions in the private and the public sectors was theft and corruption, respectively. Finally, for the culture-free (etic) model, the love of money was positively related to irritation. Corporate ethical values had a positive "double-whammy" effect: reducing irritation and enhancing life satisfaction. Unethical behavior intentions were positively related to irritation (a mediator), which was negatively related to life satisfaction. Our theory provides new insights regarding doing business in the Republic of Macedonia. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Place of the Money Bag in the Secular-Mendicant Controversy at ParisRobert J. Karris O.F.M. (bio)Money bag, money bag. So many Bible-reading Christians don't know of your existence. In their defense I note that you are only mentioned twice in the entire New Testament: John 12:6 and 13:29. If faithful Bible-reading Christians don't know of your existence, what is your fate among the faithful who are (...) less than faithful?! Is ignorance truly bliss?New Testament ScholarsMoney bag, money bag. Perhaps, New Testament scholars are the reason why you are almost unknown among Christians.1 Commentators on John's Gospel give you a passing notice, if that.2 Even when they make mention of you, they [End Page 21] generally don't integrate your existence with other features of John's theology or life situation.3 As for the Jesus Seminar, its members sweep you into the dustbin of history along with 99.9% of John's Gospel.4 You see, you are deemed unhistorical. A couple of scholars involved in the quest for the historical Jesus say "Hi!" to you, but then go on with more important matters.5 Other scholars involved in the application [End Page 22] of social science methodology to the study of the New Testament opine that you were kept as a security measure and contained money to pay for the annual temple tax and such like obligations, but then they hold their peace.6Money bag, money bag. Scholars who have investigated the theme of rich and poor in the New Testament hardly give [End Page 23] you a second glance. You do not play a leading role in their general conclusions.7So, money bag, we have to take leave of New Testament scholarship if we are going to make your acquaintance on a serious level.The Middle AgesFrancis of AssisiAs we move into the Middle Ages, we ask: Did St. Francis of Assisi provide us with guidance on how to treat you with the respect that you, O money bag, so richly deserve? You see, some scholars maintain that John's Gospel was most important to Francis's worldview.8 However, Francis doesn't seem to see the problem you created for his all-consuming embrace of Jesus' missionary command of traveling with no money.9 [End Page 24] Surely Francis knows of your existence, for he refers to you in his Fourth Admonition n. 3:And the more they (superiors) are perturbed about their superiorship being taken from them than they would be over the loss of the office of washing feet, so much the more do they collect for themselves a money bag (John 12:6; 13:29) to the peril of their souls.10Francis is heir to a Benedictine spiritualization of the money bag. See how Roger the Abbot in his Sermo in ultima cena employs the money bag:Woe, how many money bags, woe, how many purses are in the monasteries of St. Benedict! Woe, how many cowls, which cover the ears of the tonsured, enclose private supplies of the mind, the money bag of one's own will, the purse of murmuring, detraction, idleness, pride, envy, jealousy, and bad will! But remember, most beloved brothers, that those who do such things follow Judas the traitor. And therefore, unless you amend your lives, you will not possess the kingdom of God.11O money bag, so Francis goes his merry way, apparently ignorant of your true meaning and leaves the problems created by your existence to his learned followers such as Bonaventure of Bagnoregio. To Bonaventure we now turn, but do so through his responses to his secular opponents, William of Saint-Amour and Gerard of Abbeville. First let's hear from the secular masters. [End Page 25]William of Saint-Amour and Gerard of AbbevilleWilliam of Saint-Amour comments on John 12:6 and argues that it does not permit begging and is the basis for the normative view that the apostles and their successors should have a money bag. He writes:Augustine, 'the Lord had a purse to keep the offerings... (shrink)

This chapter explores a modest suggestion that John Locke is susceptible to a wide range of interpretations because of his position midway between premodern and modern conceptions of property rights. Lockean property represents an uneasy hybrid of classical or Christian theories of distributive justice and modern capitalist theories of procedural justice which have succeeded in the intervening centuries in displacing them. Locke's defense of private property is at once natural and positive, utilitarian and grounded in natural rights, secular and theological, (...) hedonistic and custodial. Lockean proprietorship generates affirmative responsibilities of good stewardship. Lockean property rights convey reciprocal entitlements and responsibilities. After Locke's painstaking treatment of the origins of money and private property in Second Treatise, the advent of political society appears a rather belated innovation. Instead of being natural or spontaneous, the social contract follows only in the wake of a community's assent to money and its attendant inequalities. (shrink)

The proliferation of public–private partnerships for development as an answer to many public challenges calls for careful evaluation. To this end, tailored frameworks are fundamental for helping understand the PPPs’ impact and for guiding corrective adjustment. Scholars have developed frameworks focusing on the partners’ relationships, the order of effects, and the distinction between outputs and outcomes. To capture a PPP’s complexity and multiple linkages with its environment, we argue that a thorough evaluation should adopt a stakeholder-oriented approach and consider the (...) costs and benefits that a PPP implies for them—especially as taxpayers’ money is involved. For this purpose, we build on a stakeholder-oriented evaluation framework from the nonprofit business partnership literature. In line with our broad evaluation conception, we extend it with the manifold ripple effects that PPPs for development have and include the time dimension for the links between different PPP stages and related outcomes to become clearer. Applying this framework to an illustrative case, we highlight important direct and especially indirect stakeholder outcomes, which a narrow evaluation would omit, point to the challenges involved in the evaluation endeavor, and identify interesting future research areas. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 124.1 (2003) 150-153 [Access article in PDF] Lisa Kallet. Money and the Corrosion of Power in Thucydides: The Sicilian Expedition and Its Aftermath. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001. xiv + 347 pp. Cloth, $55. Jonathan J. Price. Thucydides and Internal War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. xii + 410 pp. Cloth, $70. These two new contributions to Thucydidean studies are (...) similar in scope and execution. Each pursues a thesis so well defined that dust jacket summaries do them justice. Kallet argues that "the second half of Thucydides' history contains a damning critique of Athens and its leaders for becoming corrupted by money and for failing to appropriately use their financial strength to support military power." Price contends that "Thucydides consciously viewed and presented the Peloponnesian War in terms of a condition of civil strife—or stasis, in Greek." Many, if not most students of Thucydides would find each of these propositions reasonable, and some might argue that book-length narratives are not needed to establish these basic theses one way or another.Nevertheless, Thucydides requires careful study, and each of these books contains strong analyses of many key sections and themes from the History. Both studies shed a great deal of light on Thucydidean historiography beyond their immediate topics. Thucydides, however, enjoys the mixed blessing of popularity among more learned policy makers who trot him out from to time as a founder of realist thinking. In such contexts, tendentious remarks from the Melian dialogue or similarly complex contexts appear as aphorisms, and Thucydides is reduced to a sound bite. Those who are students of Greek culture, political philosophy, international relations, or some related field can easily skim these books for their core arguments but would benefit from closer readings of the particular discussions within them, many of which exhibit considerable insight and originality.Kallet's book builds on the foundations of her earlier research on Money, Expense and Naval Power in Thucydides 1-5.24 (California, 1993). Kallet begins her new work with the Melian dialogue but largely skips over the remainder of Book 5 and concentrates here on Books 6-8. The introductory chapter on the Melian dialogue introduces a core theme, which the Sicilian narrative will extend: where proper strategy uses imperialism as an investment to acquire more tangible revenue or to maintain existing sources of income, the conquest of Melos as a display of power cannot possibly yield enough revenue to justify the initial expense. The Athenians pursue this adventure not because it will improve their financial base but because they wish to demonstrate their power for third parties to observe. The radical realism of the Melian dialogue thus becomes an exercise in traditional (and by Thucydides' standards, wasteful) display of wealth and power. Thus, even as Thucydides' Athenians see themselves as progressive thinkers untrammeled by illusion, they let their illusion of sophistication blind them to the regressive policy that they are actually pursuing. [End Page 150]The following four chapters comprise a fairly discrete monograph on the Sicilian expedition. The analyses of the speeches and major actions in this section of Thucydides constitute a significant contribution to our understanding of Thucydidean narrative. Kallet's discussion of the debate between Nikias and Alkibiades at the opening of Book 6 (31-48) traces issues of public/private, community/individual, and archaic/contemporary in a clear fashion that would make it a useful reading in an introductory class on Thucydides. She traces the language of display and seduction, articulating the means whereby the Athenians succumb to problematic strategic judgments.I particularly enjoyed chapter 2, which explores the relationship between the Ionian revolt in Herodotus and the Sicilian Expedition in Thucydides. I remain uncertain in my own mind as to how much Thucydides has Herodotus in particular in mind and the degree to which Herodotus and Thucydides shared cognitive models that were almost invisible elements of Greek ideology. Given the limited sample of Greek source materials, we may never achieve any certainty, but even... (shrink)

According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, there are over 20 million refugees worldwide, less than 1% of whom are referred for resettlement to third countries permanently. One obstacle to resettlement stems from the alleged lack of resources in settlement countries. A possible way forward is a refugee selection and admission regime that shares costs between governments and private citizens, to permit states to admit greater numbers of refugees where their citizens are willing and able to contribute their (...) own, private, resources to the resettlement project. Taking Canada’s private sponsorship scheme as a model, I argue that there are pros and cons to public–private cooperation in refugee resettlement. On the one hand, they permit the resettlement of greater numbers of refugees and they permit private citizens committed to aiding refugees to do so in concrete ways. On the other hand, they require oversight to protect refugees who are, otherwise, fully dependent on their sponsorship groups and there are cultural differences that make the offering of support challenging. In particular, while sponsorship groups ought to aim at securing the independence and autonomy of newcomers, they can sometimes behave in culturally inappropriate and paternalistic ways, which generate resentments between refugees and their sponsoring groups. (shrink)

Medicine and Money explores the role of beneficence and cost control in health-care systems. The book's primary concern of morally improving medicine is achieved by dividing the argument into two parts. The first defines the crisis in health-care and justifies beneficence. The second part offers practical suggestions on implementing beneficence into the system. Medicine and Money is one of the few books to provide concrete suggestions on improving the health-care system from the micro level for addressing cost (...) concerns in a morally acceptable manner. (shrink)

The legitimacy of putting public activities – such as providing education and welfare, but also running prisons or providing military services – into the hands of private companies is hotly contested. In The Privatized State, Chiara Cordelli puts forward an original argument, from a Kantian perspective, for why it is problematic: it replaces the omnilateral will of all citizens, which is realized through public institutions, with the unilateral will of agents to whom these activities have been delegated. While adding an (...) important dimension to the debate, I am not fully convinced that private institutions always fail to realize the omnilateral will, and that this is the only, or always most central, normative problem of privatization. Instead, many concrete cases of privatization seem normatively overdetermined in their wrongness. Nonetheless, Cordelli’s brilliant discussion invites us to rethink these phenomena from an important angle and helps us to better understand what an ideal civil service would look like. (shrink)

Architecture has always been a magnificent and much debated platform to express the spirit of the times, world views, everyday life, and aesthetics. It is a daring materialisation of private and public visions, of applied art and the avant-garde alike.

Money is a symbol. Beginning with this simple notion, we have completed a qualitative study of how money exists in people’s everyday lives and how it is used symbolically. A review of the financial, economic, psychological, and semiotic literature shows that even though money is written and talked about exhaustively, little symbol theory appears in economic writing, and we rarely found money mentioned in semiotic texts. We used a qualitative, phenomenological approach to identify critical thematic elements (...) and underlying structures of participants’ experience. We also incorporated an accepted symbol-structure template in our analysis of the functions, emotions, actions, and reactions in the transactions our participants described. Participants refer to money both as wealth in the abstract and as concrete amounts about to be used. Our analysis of money in the abstract describes a structure of experience involving belonging, privacy and secrecy, unequal distribution, quantitative uncertainty, reflections of life history, and values. Our analysis of money in the concrete reveals a symbolic intention and a variety of “Others” engaged in the symbolic action. (shrink)

Based on theory of planned behavior, we develop a theoretical model involving love of money (LOM), job satisfaction (attitude), coping strategies/responses (perceived behavioral control), work environment (subjective norm), and work-related behavioral intentions (behavioral intention). We tested this model using job satisfaction as a mediator and sector (public versus private), personal character (good apples versus bad apples), gender, and income as moderators in a sample of 515 employees and their managers in the Republic of Macedonia. For the whole sample, both (...) coping strategies and helpful work environment were related to high job satisfaction. The relationship between work environment and job satisfaction was the strongest link in all subsequent analyses. High LOM is associated with unfavorable work environment for employees in the private sectors and people with low income and is positively associated with coping strategies for bad apples. A favorable work environment was related to less corrupt intent for people in the public sectors, good apples, and with low income, but not for their counterparts. Coping strategies were related to high job satisfaction for males, but not for females. Our counterintuitive results showed that bad apples’ high LOM was related to low corrupt intent. Our theoretical model sheds new light and provides novel theoretical, empirical, and practical implications to Macedonian managers’ corrupt intent. (shrink)

For the first time in the article, paper currency signs of the year 1926 of the “Azneft” Trust Department are involved in the study. A brief history of the period, the social and public situation, and a list of private issues in Azerbaijan are provided on the basis of factual material—paper money signs. Indicating the main meaning of this material, the authors have collected and analysed information about the features, varieties, and place of printing of this issue. Also, color (...) images of denominations, which were not previously known and not published, are presented for the first time to the attention of readers, and a complete and systematic catalog has also been compiled. The article is of interest to bonists, historians, collectors, and other interested parties. The main results of this research are used in research projects. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Nietzsche’s Reading and Private Library, 1885–1889Thomas H. BrobjerOne can easily get the impression that Nietzsche read little, especially later in his life. He criticizes reading because it is not sufficiently life-affirming and Dionysian: “Early in the morning at the break of day, in all the freshness and dawn of one’s strength, to read a book—I call that vicious!...” 1 He also criticizes it for making one reactive and forcing (...) one to be concerned with the thoughts of others rather than with one’s own:My eyes alone put an end to all bookwormishness, in plain terms philology: I was redeemed from the “book,” for years I read nothing—the greatest favour I have ever done myself!—That deepest self, as it were buried and grown silent under a constant compulsion to listen to other selves (—and that is what reading means!) awoke slowly, timidly, doubtfully—but at length it spoke again. 2This impression is strengthened by the fact that in his published books from 1885–88 very few contemporary and minor authors and books are mentioned. [End Page 663] He also explicitly claims that he read little: “It does not perhaps lie in my nature to read much or many kinds of things: a reading room makes me ill.... Caution, even towards new books is rather part of my instinct.” 3 Concretely, he claims in Ecce Homo that, “I have to reckon back half a year to catch myself with a book in my hand. But what was it?—An excellent study by Victor Brochard, les Sceptiques Grecs.” 4 As suggested in a quotation above, and as a major leitmotif in his letters, his health and especially that of his eyes is another reason to assume that he read little. This is also how most philosophers and historians have tended to treat Nietzsche—as an isolated, profound thinker.However, this impression and Nietzsche’s claims here are to a large extent incorrect. Nietzsche was, in fact, a rather substantial reader. This is true not only for his younger days but also for his last four active years, 1885–88. 5 Contrary to his claim that he is hostile to new books, he was very pleased with the large trilingual bookshop Löscher in Turin. He was a frequent and good enough customer to know its “Chef “ and to make contacts through it. 6 Nietzsche frequently used other bookshops, ordered book catalogues, and asked for recommendations of new book titles. 7 Nietzsche found some of the most important books in his life as random discoveries in bookshops, for example, those of Schopenhauer, Stendhal, and Dostoyevsky. Contrary to his claim that a reading room made him ill, he praised Turin for its good libraries, 8 and he wrote to his sister: “one cannot even with ten horses draw me to a place where, if I am correctly informed, not even a good library is to be found.” 9 Libraries were [End Page 664] important for Nietzsche’s reading, and the quality of the libraries was an important determining factor in deciding Nietzsche’s travels and places of residence. He even occasionally wrote to libraries to inquire if they were suitable for his purposes and for deciding if he would visit the town. 10 During the period 1885–88 Nietzsche used the libraries in Nice, Leipzig, Chur, Venice, Turin, and the Hotel Alpenrosen’s library in Sils-Maria. He probably also used the library in Zürich and possibly in other towns, and he planned to visit Stuttgart for the sake of its library.Nietzsche did not have a permanent address during the period discussed in this article and hence travelled frequently. But travelling was difficult for him and almost without exception made him ill, and it was more difficult still with a heavy load of books. During these years Nietzsche lived on a low pension from the University of Basel and constantly worried about his expenses. In spite of this he bought a not insignificant number of books. His private library today contains 60 books published from 1885 to 1888 and in 23 of these Nietzsche has made markings, often extensively, and from several... (shrink)

Corruption within the private sector has often not been dealt with in Brazil. Organizations may find corrupt acts in its operations or practices, but specific concepts and programs to avoid them are neither concrete nor clear. Some Brazilian stockholders have become aware of the risks involved in unethical procedures and are adopting the Best Practices of Corporate Governance initiative. International agencies have intensively supported organizations and governments in an effort to define policies that inhibit illegal or corrupt cultural habits (...) throughout the world, but Brazilian practitioners show insufficient response. Skepticism may indicate a lack of understanding about how an ethical leadership can guide employees, setting high standards for the organizational culture and climate, clearly defining limits of correct behavior, and creating appropriate codes of ethics. Transparency still has to be discovered as a significant tool to encourage professionalism in performance and reporting of data in Brazilian companies. In this article, we analyze the ethical behavior of the purchasing department of a multinational company in its host country, Brazil. It focuses specifically on the supplier–buyer relationship. The results indicate that despite the negative reputation Brazilians have in business ethics, a company can still develop a positive and ethical relationship with its stakeholders. Communication, transparency, compliance with the company’s code of conduct as well as the supplier’s awareness of the buyer’s code of conduct are the factors which influence the supplier–buyer relationship. Transparency can be used as a tool to reduce corruption, thereby increasing ethical behavior and company image. Good ethical behavior can help to build up a company’s image. (shrink)

Within democratic societies, a deep division exists over the nature of community and the grounds for political life. Should the political order be neutral between competing conceptions of the good life or should it be based on some such conception? This book addresses one crucial set of problems raised by this division: What bases should officials and citizens employ in reaching political decisions and justifying their positions? Should they feel free to rely on whatever grounds seem otherwise persuasive to them, (...) like religious convictions, or should they restrict themselves to "public reasons," reasons that are shared within the society or arise from the premises of liberal democracy? Kent Greenawalt argues that fundamental premises of liberal democracy alone do not provides answers to these questions, that much depends on historical and cultural contexts. After examining past and current practices and attitudes in the United States, he offers concrete suggestions for appropriate principles relevant to American society today. This incisive and timely analysis by one of our leading legal philosophers should attract a wide and diverse readership of scholars, practitioners, and concerned citizens. (shrink)

We are accustomed to thinking that a primrose is "concrete" and a prime number is "abstract," that "roundness" is more abstract than "round," and that "property" is more abstract than "roundness." In reality, the relation between "abstract" and "concrete" is more like the (non)relation between "abstract" and "concave," "concrete" being a sensory term [about what something feels like] and "abstract" being a functional term (about what the sensorimotor system is doing with its input in order to produce (...) its output): Feelings and things are correlated, but otherwise incommensurable. Everything that any sensorimotor system such as ourselves manages to categorize successfully is based on abstracting sensorimotor "affordances" (invariant features). The rest is merely a question of what inputs we can and do categorize, and what we must abstract from the particulars of each sensorimotor interaction in order to be able to categorize them correctly. To categorize, in other words, is to abstract. And not to categorize is merely to experience. Borges's Funes the Memorious, with his infinite, infallible rote memory, is a fictional hint at what it would be like not to be able to categorize, not to be able to selectively forget and ignore most of our input by abstracting only its reliably recurrent invariants. But a sensorimotor system like Funes would not really be viable, for if something along those lines did exist, it could not categorize recurrent objects, events or states, hence it could have no language, private or public, and could at most only feel, not function adaptively (hence survive). Luria's "S" in "The Mind of a Mnemonist" is a real-life approximation whose difficulties in conceptualizing were directly proportional to his difficulties in selectively forgetting and ignoring. Watanabe's "Ugly Duckling Theorem" shows how, if we did not selectively weight some properties more heavily than others, everything would be equally (and infinitely and indifferently) similar to everything else. Miller's "Magical Number Seven Plus or Minus Two" shows that there are (and must be) limitations on our capacity to process and remember information, both in our capacity to discriminate relatively (detect sameness/difference, degree-of-similarity) and in our capacity to discriminate absolutely (identify, categorize, name), The phenomenon of categorical perception shows how selective feature-detection puts a Whorfian "warp" on our feelings of similarity in the service of categorization, compressing within-category similarities and expanding between-category differences by abstracting and selectively filtering inputs through their invariant features, thereby allowing us to sort and name things reliably. Language does allow us to acquire categories indirectly through symbolic description.... (shrink)

Medieval coin plays an essential role in the imagined history of money: it figures as the primal "commodity money" — a natural medium, spontaneously adopted by parties in exchange who converge upon a metal like silver to represent the value of other goods. As a natural medium with a price objectively established through trade, commodity money appears to offer an independent means of measure in the market. But as the history offered here reveals, medieval money was (...) nothing like its imagined alternative. England’s early coin became a medium when the government began to spend and tax in that unit of account, took coin as a mode of payment, and allowed it to be transferred between people in the meantime. Individuals participated in the arrangement, paying for coin in exchange for the unique quality — liquidity — that set money apart from a commodity. That quality was orchestrated by the very channels that brought public and private together in the project of making a medium. In fact, insofar as the English equated money with the commodity it contained, they engineered instability into the heart of their medium. Depreciating coin — diluting its commodity content — offered a cure. It also confirmed that coin had never been the "commodity money" imagined in later accounts. Coin was, instead, a constitutional medium, one that related the government to its participants and thus helped to configure the world it appeared merely to measure. (shrink)

This paper tackles the current challenges to private sector unionism in the United States in light of Catholic social teaching (CST). The focus of the study is unionism in the private sector where the fall-off in membership is observed. CST is contained in a wide variety of official documents of the Catholic Church, in particular papal encyclicals, which present ethical norms for economic life in response to the changing realities of the modern world. The study begins with an analysis of (...) the concrete situation: the causes of decline in union membership. It is followed by an ethical reflection on CST’s perspectives and exploration of practices, strategies, and policies that can help reverse the ongoing trend of union decline and revitalize the labor movement in the country. The paper argues that unions are good in themselves as an expression of the workers’ right to associate and instrumentally good as they invoke such values as the dignity of work, solidarity, subsidiarity, common good, and economic equality. While it has been proven that workers and society as a whole gain material benefits from effective unionization, focus on intangible benefits and moral principles offered by CST may give labor organizing a new impetus and inspiration. (shrink)

Adam Smith paid considerable attention to the problems of money, banking, and the price level in The Wealth of Nations. Smith favoured private ownership and competition in banking, but he also favoured several legal restrictions, including usury laws, a lower limit on the size of bank notes, and elimination of ‘the option clause’ which permitted banks to delay payment of notes in hard money if they chose to do so. In monetary theory, Smith was a quantity theorist. He (...) thought that real income was determined mainly by real forces, so that money in Smith’s schema mostly affected the price level. All of Smith’s judgements in the area of money and banking were based on his wide reading of monetary history, and his empirical investigations. (shrink)

Many contributions explained in details the various benefits from private roads. Not only they stressed the possibility of such system, but also the functioning through different historical experiences. However, they put aside an important question: how should we proceed concretely in order to privatize the road network? Our contribution tries to answer this question. It explains the consequences of a public provision and its differences with a free market order. It defines the true meaning of the privatization process: a search (...) for justice, and proposes a solution based on Rothbard’s theory of property rights. The paper concludes on some critics that we raised to alternative process of privatization.Le réseau routier constitue un bien privé qui peut faire l’objet d’une offre de la part d’entrepreneurs. Or aujourd’hui, celui-ci est géré par le secteur public. Se pose le problème de sa “désocialisation” ou de sa transmission au secteur privé par privatisation. Nous démontrons que les procédés de privatisation couramment utilisés se focalisent seulement sur un critère de rentabilité et en cela se révèlent insuffisants. La méthode par restitution se présente quant à elle comme un procédé recherchant un principe de justice, conforme à l’éthique des droits de propriété. Nous présentons alors les modalités pratiques d’une telle méthode appliquée au réseau routier. (shrink)

A comparison of the engineering schools at UC Berkeley and Stanford during the 1940s and 1950s shows that having an excellent academic program is necessary but not sufficient to make a university entrepreneurial. Key factors that made Stanford more entrepreneurial than Cal during this period were superior leadership and a focused strategy. The broader institutional context mattered as well. Stanford did not have the same access to state funding as public universities and some private universities. Therefore, in order to gather (...) resources, Stanford was forced to become entrepreneurial first, developing business skills at the same time Cal was developing political skills. Stanford ’s early development of entrepreneurial business skills played a crucial role in the development of Silicon Valley. (shrink)

Shadow education, or supplementary private tutoring, has expanded to become a multi-billion-dollar industry worldwide, capitalising on the desires of parents and their children to succeed and excel in education. In doing so, shadow education draws upon and reproduces cultural capital represented by knowledge, skills and educational credentials and symbolic capital constituted in the prestige, privilege and legitimacy of educational achievement. The study on which this article is based adopts a critical discourse analytic approach to examine the websites of five leading (...) private tuition centres in Singapore as seen through the lens of Bourdieu’s concept of capital. The aim is to identify specific forms of cultural capital, examine how they are harnessed for promotional purposes, and show how this reflects and reproduces the forms and representations of educational achievement and success valued in Singapore. Findings offer a deeper understanding of the marketing discourse of shadow education that pivots on the quality of private tutors, success beyond examinations and school, and concrete representations of social distinction and achievement. More significantly, the study contributes to research situated at the nexus of shadow education and Bourdieu’s concept of capital to shed light on how shadow education reflects and magnifies broader socio-cultural orientations and socio-economic structures. (shrink)

In this Article I argue that the global credit crunch of 2007-2009 is the result of the multifaceted phenomenon of liquidity illusion. Fundamentally, the problem of liquidity illusion derives from the hollow conceptualization of "liquidity" in mainstream financial theory and practice. Represented most recently by the market completion theory, this paradigm has led to a widespread misunderstanding of the dynamics of the relationship between the process of financial innovation and the liquidity of the financial system. In order to unpack the (...) political economy of liquidity illusion from other factors in the leadup to the global credit crunch, this Article builds upon Hyman Minsky’s vision of financial innovation and crisis. Challenging mainstream views of the liquidity-enhancing process of financial innovation, I identify the three pillars of liquidity illusion in the recent 2002-2007 bout of securitization: a) the paradigm of self-regulating finance; b) the role of Ponzi finance; and c) the function of private authority, namely credit rating agencies. (shrink)

This is an empirical phenomenological inquiry into everyday experiences of daydreaming. The theoretical literature was found to be deficient in accounting for the ambiguity inherent to the phenomenon and lacking in concrete empirical descriptions. This study's phenomenological method was implemented in response to a body of natural scientific studies utilizing methods that were found to be inadequate to the task of comprehending and understanding the lived subjective experience of the phenomenon. From five subject interviews and their subsequent analysis via (...) the phenomenological method, the researcher was able to derive a general structural description of the experience of daydreaming. It was found that daydreaming is essentially the representation/enactment of a mood, the understanding of which is inseparable from the situated biographical project of the individual. As an act of consciousness it was described as a passive movement into two, distinct subject-world relationships, sustained by a directing-spectator position that is both detached and interfused with these two world relations. Details of these findings and their implications are discussed. (shrink)

This book presents the first full-length explanation in English of Heinsohn and Steiger's groundbreaking theory of money and interest, which emphasizes the role played by private property rights. Ownership economics gives an alternative explanation of money and interest, proposing that operations enabled by property lead to interest and money, rather than exchange of goods. Like any other approach, it has to answer economic theory's core question: what is the loss that has to be compensated by interest? Ownership (...) economics accepts neither a temporary loss of goods, as in neoclassical economics, nor Keynes's temporary loss of already existing, exogenous money as the cause of interest. Rather, money is created as a non-physical title to property in a credit contract secured by a debtor's collateral and the creditor's net worth. This book is an edited English translation of a highly successful German text, and offers the first book-length treatment of a theory which has received much interest since its first appearance in articles in the late 1970s. (shrink)

The potato blight that struck Ireland in 1845 led to ineffable suffering that sent shockwaves throughout the Anglosphere. The Irish Famine is deemed to be the first national calamity to attract extensive help and support from all around the world. Even though the Irish did not receive adequate support from the British government, their ordeal was mitigated by private charity. Without the donations from a great number of individuals, the death toll among the famished Irishmen and Irishwomen would have been (...) definitely higher. The greatest and most generous amount of assistance came from the United States. In spite of the fact that the U.S. Congress did not decide to earmark any money for the support of famine-stricken Ireland, the horrors taking place in this part of the British Empire pulled at American citizens’ heartstrings and they contributed munificently to the help of the Irish people. Aiding Ireland was embraced by the American press, which, unlike major British newspapers, lauded private efforts to bring succour to the Irish. Such American newspapers as the Daily National Intelligencer, the New York Herald and the Liberator encouraged their readers to contribute to the relief of Ireland and applauded efforts to help the Irish. The aim of this essay is to argue that the American press, in general, played a significant role in encouraging private charity in the United States towards the Irish at the time of An Gorta Mór and, thus, helped to save many lives. (shrink)

In his book, Defending the Undefendable, Walter Block makes the case that an individual counterfeiter of fiat notes does not commit a natural law crime, because money issued by the government is itself counterfeit. Several authors, including Murphy, Machaj, and Davidson, have taken issue with Block’s argument. In Davidson, I maintain that while the issuance and use of fiat currency by the state violates the natural law, fiat notes are not counterfeit, and their use by ordinary people is legitimate. (...) The private counterfeiter is a thief when he exchanges his notes with these innocents, because they are rightful owners of both the fiat currency and the goods for which it is exchanged. Block, in a rejoinder, disputes this on both ethical and utilitarian grounds. The present paper is a response to Block, and an elaboration of my original article. From a natural law perspective, I explore the ethical violations surrounding counterfeiting, and the legitimacy of producing and using fiat money by both the state and the individual. (shrink)

Seventeenth century scholastics had a rich debate about the ontological status and nature of lacks, negations, and privations. Realists in this debate posit irreducible negative entities responsible for the non-existence of positive entities. One of the first scholastics to develop a realist position on negative entities was Thomas Compton Carleton. In this paper I explain Carleton's theory of negative entities, including what it is for something to be negative, how negative entities are individuated, whether they are abstract or concrete, (...) and how they affect their subjects. I argue that for Carleton, negative entities are conceived as spatially extended simples that affect their subjects by means of spatial overlap. I also show how Carleton responds to some theological worries about his realism concerning negative entities. (shrink)

This study investigates experimentally whether people in retrospective are self-aware that they engage in status-seeking behavior. Subjects participated in a real-effort task where effort translated into a donation to a charity. Within-subjects we varied the visibility of their performance (private/public feedback). On average, subjects exerted more effort in the public treatment. After the real-effort task, subjects were asked to state their retrospective beliefs about their performance in public given feedback about their performance in private, and about the performance of other (...) subjects in public given the average performance in private. Between-subjects, we varied the compensation that participants would receive for providing accurate performance estimates. Our results show a lack of self-awareness about status-seeking behavior that is robust to increased belief compensation. We also found that subjects expected others to be as status-seeking as they are themselves or even less. (shrink)

In A Treatise on Virtues and Rewards, Dragonetti advances a theory of action based on rewards for virtues. The idea of rewards, especially of awards, relies on the hypothesis that intrinsic motivations drive the actions of good or virtuous citizens. We apply this theory to virtuous entrepreneurs who voluntarily adopt ethical principles as promoted by a recent Italian law. These firms receive an ethical rating by the Italian Competition Authority and can access a set of economic and non-economic benefits. We (...) survey a sample of 152 private companies with an ER and examine their views on the economic and social motivations and benefits as well as the perceived usefulness of the ER for improving ethical behaviour. An exploratory factor analysis detects four categories of motivation and two categories of benefits, which we use in regression models to test Dragonetti’s theory. Overall, respondents see the ER as an effective tool, except in terms of improving economic performance. We also find that entrepreneurs with lower economic and higher responsiveness motivations attain higher ERs. However, in the respondents’ opinions, the ER is not producing any concrete benefits since we find no relationship between the ER and economic or competitive rewards. These findings have implications for the ICA as well as for private companies. (shrink)

This article investigates the distribution of power in Poland’s drug reimbursement policy in the early 2000s. We examine competing theoretical expectations suggested by neopluralism, historical institutionalism, corporate domination, and clique theory of the post-communist state, using data from a purposive sample of 109 semi-structured interviews and documentary sources. We have four concrete findings. First, we uncovered rapid growth in budgetary spending on expensive drugs for narrow groups of patients. Second, to achieve these favorable policy outcomes drug companies employed two (...) prevalent methods of lobbying: informal persuasion of key members of local cliques and endorsements expressed by patient organizations acting as seemingly independent “third parties.” Third, medical experts were co-opted by multinational drug companies because they relied on these firms for scientific and financial resources that were crucial for their professional success. Finally, there was one-way social mobility from the state to the pharmaceutical sector, not the “revolving door” pattern familiar from advanced capitalist countries, with deleterious consequences for state capacity. Overall, the data best supported a combination of corporate domination and clique theory: drug reimbursement in Poland was dominated by Western multinationals in collaboration with domestically based cliques. (shrink)